Guild Wars 2

While I’m still not entirely convinced whether the add-on is really worth the price tag or not, I appreciate this step: Buying the add-on is no longer off the table and should something really catch my interest in future revelations about it I’ll put my money where my mouth is.

Ohoni.6057:

Why do people keep acting as if the promotional push for HoT is done?

Because they already sell the bloody thing and if you want to sell a product you’re better off at least trying to show what’s in for potential customers. If there would be a huge amount of content in this add-on, it would be insane to actually think that they would care to hide anything but the details which they already use weekly to create buzz.

Ohoni.6057:

If they did not feel that their content was worth $50, then they would not price it at $50 or they would continue to add content. They know more than you about how much content is in the game, so they have a better idea of what it’s worth. Is it possible that even once you know everything that’s in it, you still won’t feel it worth $50? Sure, but for the time being, they know better than you.

Alright, I get it, you really have no idea about economics. While I don’t have time or see the need to explain the world to you, I’ll try to give you at least an idea about how things like this happen.
The motivation behind a project like this is money. Without money, this game would not exist, end of story. The motivation behind most business is money. If a company wants to sell a product, the first question is: How much does the project cost us? The second question is: How much money can we possibly make with it? And no, the third question is not how much worth the project actually has for the customer. When it comes to the price tag, companies are interested in how much they can charge to get the most potential customers into buying the stuff.
Marketing researches make a lot of money by trying to figure out how much a company may charge for their products and how to lure potential customers into buying for more money than they would be willing to under normal circumstances.
All your ‘they think it’s worth it’ is fantasy, I’m sorry if I have to destroy your illusions. This is not a modding crew trying to make some money, this is an actual business. That’s also why you always have to watch for your wallet as a customer whenever somebody wants to sell something. Nobody is immune to good marketing after all.
And just in case you’re wondering whether I’m a crazy conspiracy theorist or not: It’s part of my job to read actual scientific studies about things like that to stay on top of things. It’s not like this research would take place in a secret government base or anything like that, if you look around you can even take part in studies like that and get some products or money out of it. It’s neither a secret nor rocket science.

Ohoni.6057:

Conspiracy theory nonsense. The FAQ was written to be accurate at the time it was written. The situation on the ground changed, causing the FAQ to become inaccurate. They changed the FAQ at the earliest possible time to reflect this new reality. That is not at all “false advertising,” and that meme is only being promoted by those who just want the expansion to be cheaper in the first place.

If there wouldn’t have been sales events beforehand, maybe. Under this circumstances? Not by a long shot. And your made up theory for the reason why people bring this up is mostly kitten.

Ohoni.6057:

I’ve bought a few bank tabs myself, no bag space though. But if you compare the way that GW2 leverages these systems when compared to other games, they are WAY ahead of the competition. I mean, GW2 offers hundreds of bank spaces that are entirely free to the players, if you add up five characters with twenty slot bags, the potential for a personal guild bank, and all the crafting mat slots. I’ve seen other games where your entire account only gets a few dozen slots. You don’t need the added bank or bag spaces, given what ANet offers for free, but you might find it more convenient. I don’t see this as being remotely egregious on their part.

It doesn’t matter at all whether other companies do worse than that or not. It’s a dirty tactic even without it being the worst example on the market if you deliberately create the demand you meet afterwards for a hefty amount.

I never wrote that I deserve anything for anything from ArenaNet, that’s something you made up. I am a customer and if they want to charge me for something, I’ll check first whether the offer is any good or not. In the case of HoT, it’s not.

What I actually wanted to show with my post is that giving out character slots would not be an act of generosity and it also was not an act of generosity from the companies who did this in the past or will in the future. Satisfied customers are the best marketing you can possibly have as a company, causing an uproar like this because you didn’t want to give the player base something that costs you basically nothing is usually not a very clever business decision: it makes a quick buck because of fanboys, but it hurts in the long run.

Ohoni.6057:

Well, they priced it at $50, they feel it contains $50 worth of content, and they know more about it than you do.

That’s a bold assumption you made there. First of all: They want to sell a product. If they don’t show what’s in for the customer, they should either fire their PR department and fix this, or there really is not that much to tell about. Second: You make the assumption that the calculation is based around whether they think that the content is actually worth the price tag. That’s not how the economy works, I’m sorry.

Ohoni.6057:

WRONG – Anyone who bought it up to a couple months before that can get a refund. Even if that were not the case though, it happens. Any time anyone has a sale, there are always people who buy before the sale is announced that end up paying the pre-sale pricing. There’s nothing underhanded about that.

They can get a refund if they ask for it, losing all their progress in exchange, yes. Not a particular great deal depending on how much time they’ve already spend and a method of discouraging players to actually ask for the refund. It’s at least borderline false advertising nonetheless because they changed the F.A.Q. silently in the process.
Things like that make new customers sceptical about the trustworthiness of a business model and that’s not exactly what you want as a publisher in the long run – but thinking in long terms is also not what the economy is usually about in market-listed companies.

About the cash shop: Cosmetic items are not an issue, but there is no way around the fact that the gem shop also has convenience items for inconveniences which have been implemented in the game beforehand. That’s an underhanded sales tactic often criticized in games with cash shops (number of inventory slots and bank slots in case of GW2), so don’t pretend that everything in the gem shop is nothing but cosmetic stuff. It’s not, and I somewhat doubt that every GW2 developer was particularly happy about that.

It also should be noted that the costs for an additional character slot are miniscule from the provider point of view. They are expensive for us if we decide to buy them, but not for ArenaNet or NCSoft if they would decide to give them out for free.

Having slots as a cash cow because of the revenant is the only reason why they didn’t give you one as part of the standard edition and that’s the kind of behavior that really upsets me.
I would accept this if all the additional money would be used to further polish the game and to develop new content, but that’s not how the economy works, especially as soon as you deal with market-listed companies like NCSoft.

A sizeable chunk of the money won’t be reinvested in GW2 but used to please shareholders and other corporate bs, and that’s the point where a business practice is the result of nothing but greed. They already make a lot of money with the game and they certainly would have with a better HoT deal, but it’s never enough for them, they want more and forcing players to buy a character slot for the revenant is a method to accomplish this.

While that’s not illegal by any means, it’s also the point where there really is no overlap between corporate and consumer interests. If you support such behaviour as a customer, you encourage such business practices and that’s not a good thing for all GW2 players in the long run.

I don’t really mind the pre-buy bonus as I’m no longer willing to pre-buy or pre-order anything by now, but what I do mind is the price tag of 50$. If this price would include a full fledged out campaign with a lot of well designed maps I would not mind paying that much, but so far I haven’t seen anything to convince me that we get more than season 3 of the living story taking place on very few maps and an exclusive part of a feature pack from the category ‘nice to have’.
I’m sorry, but that’s not enough for such a high price tag, especially without a free character slot.

Derenek, I don’t see myself as a fanboy of any sorts. I even have criticized the game and its developers on more than one occasion in the past and I still don’t think of GW2 being the best possible game, although I like it enough to care and play nonetheless.
But as I wrote earlier, I don’t think that it would improve the game by any means to merely stretch old and well known content. If you don’t use the well known tactics and play with casuals, a run will take hours to complete, and I doubt that this is what casual players are actually looking for if they want to have fun with a game. The dungeon meta is actually the easy way of getting the job done and for a player who is at least not a stranger to the game mechanics, has a decent equipment (which is not hard to get) and is able to play monkey see, monkey do with the more experienced players in the group, it’s not hard to enter the world of dungeons in GW2.
Nerfing the current way of doing things would make things more challenging as would new content with more complex mechanics. Rising Dusk hit the nail right on the head by pointing out that more complex boss mechanics and the like would rather leave casual players behind than helping them to join the fun.
For seasoned veterans this would actually improve the dungeon part of the game. Casuals would end up between a rock and a hard place, though, as opposed to the current dungeon meta.

I seriously doubt that you can back up that GW2 lost a lot of players due to the dungeon meta, it’s more likely that you made this up simply because you and your friends don’t like the way GW2 handles this type of content – which is fine, don’t get me wrong. Even though GW2 tries to cater to the largest possibe audience, it’s not possibly to satisfy ever possible player in the long run.

You overlook something important, though. The dungeons we have are old content. There was a time when the majority of players was not able to clear a dungeon path without their characters leaving said dungeon path in underwear. Today it’s almost common knowledge how to get the job done and most players who go into a dungeon want to make a (more or less) quick buck.

Nerfing the meta – which actually allows even more casual players to join those runs if they care at least a bit about the game mechanics – wouldn’t improve the actual content, it would mostly taking away a reliable way to get gold and that’s about it. Few people would care about those dungeons anymore if not for the reward at the end which simply doesn’t justify spending hours doing a single run in its current state.

And talking about group play enjoyment: If you’re looking for the enjoyment of group play, a pick up group is the wrong place. I can only speak for myself, but I enjoy spending time with my friends even during a slow dungeon run. I don’t enjoy spending the same amount of time with strangers not getting the job done in a group looking for experienced dungeon runners – that’s what beginner or free for all runs are for.

Four chapters and all important characters have been established. Your allies have a grudge against the villain and you are involved: You witnessed the horror the villain has unleashed and met the terrified refugees as well as Braham and Rox, both scarred for life for the same reason, and you certainly don’t want Kashmeer to be another victim of such a ruthless foe as long as there is any chance to rescue her. You’re ready to learn how deep the rabbid hole goes.
Once you’ve accepted that the villain is dangerous and worth your time, it’s much easier to accept an eccentric, psychotic villain like Scarlet. With the failed setup we actually got, Scarlet had an unnecessarily rough start. The impression of her scheme being too big and complicated for such a small story and her abilities and ressources being over the top didn’t help her, either, but talking about that would go beyond the scope of the discussion. In the end, working on a much better setup will be one of the key factors for the second installment of the Living Story. For the first one all you can do is to try to give it a conciliatory end without damaging or killing promising characters

Delvoire.8930:

The build up has been there. It’s a shame most people haven’t been able to see it or understand it.

Someone made a complaint that the writers are paid to make good stories? Because every writer out there makes awesome stories. I mean Stephen King is a great write according to most, yet you’ll find many people who don’t like his writing at all.

It’s all a matter of perspective and personal likes and dislikes.

Allow me to quote this post to show a fundamental flaw in your argument. You’re right about good writing being a matter of perspective, but it’s also a matter of success. If you write for the broad public and the resonance is mostly negative, you didn’t get the job done, even if your writing is otherwise an acceptable result for a professional writer.
The Living Story is questionable in every way. If most people don’t see or understand the setup for the story and the villain, the setup is rubbish, it is as simple as that, and looking into it, it’s not a very sophisticated challenge to understand what the writers were trying to achieve. It falls flat because it doesn’t work emotionally, it is not consistent with the overall setting and not connected to the personal story.
Most of this has been discussed to death, the interesting part for this thread is the lack of connection to the story and the villain, which is actually one of the most important tasks for any writer.
As Mia described it: You have several incidents, seemingly independent from each other, and all of sudden Scarlet appears and starts to… well, she starts to annoy people. Yes, there were hints at a mastermind behind all this and it was to be expected that said mastermind would come into the limelight sooner or later, but the story failed entirely to connect the players to her. I’ve yet to meet a player who actually wants to take Scarlet down because she is the evil mastermind behind the Living Story, people either want to kill her because she annoys them by being part of the story, or they don’t care at all and just farm for the achievments one day just to get back to business.
A setup like that is terrible, plain and simple.

Let’s compare this to a very conventional setup for a story like that. Nothing fancy, neither sophisticated nor complex, but it works even in such a simple fashion.

1. The player meets Marjory and Kashmeer and gets involved in a small adventure, nothing fancy, just a good, self-contained story. The only purpose is to give the duo some screentime to establish them as allies the player may like to work with in the future.

2. After a while the player gets another message from Marjory to assist her once more. This time the problem merely seems to be another little job, but it ends up being part of a greater scheme and at the end of the day you’re aware of having ruined the day for somebody you haven’t been aware of from the beginning.

3. Things escalate quickly. Marjory and her sidekick as well as the player, who is also far more than a simple citizen of Tyria, are a threat to the great scheme and the villain wants to stop them before they learn too much about it. She doesn’t want to kill them right away, she just wants them to be out of the way and makes the mistake that will ultimately lead to her demise: She kidnaps a close friend or loved one, in this case Lady Kashmeer. The message is clear and simple: Keep your nose out of my business and she will be free once all is set and done.
At the same time, the alliance of flame an frost launches a devastating attack and gets in the way of Braham and Rox. The villain is now established as a dangerous adversary and connected to the events, but remains a mysterious foe as you know nothing about her, not even the name or what she looks like.

4. Neither Marjory nor the player are willing to back down, but in order to strike back, you need much more information and additional help. The pact you’ve lead into battle has yet to recover from your last victory and is also not your private army. You might be able to summon them later on, but for now you have to do the dirty work yourself. Marjory knows enough people to gather some useful information, meanwhile you have to deal with more urgent matters: As a hero of Tyria, authorities call for your aid: They are busy with the refugees and the military forces don’t have the ressources to fight off the alliance, save the refugees AND investigate what caused the incident. You get to work, meet Braham and Rox, help them out and once their most urgent problems are solved, they feel like having a score to settle with whoever is responsible for the mess.

Reading the posts from the RoS forum warriors resembles a car accident: It’s horrible, but you just can’t turn away. I would almost go so far to say that I’ll miss posts like this once this forum is closed… but almost doesn’t count.

In contradistinction to all the ranting that has been going on here since the start of the match, I would like to give thanks to those players from Ruins of Surmia and Whiteside Ridge who didn’t care about the frustration of those who joined RoS for a title shot gone wrong or about being the underdog in case of WSR and were doing their best to put up a fight.
I really enjoyed some of the encounters this week, no matter the outcome, and with all the ranting going on I feel it’s necessary to show respect to those players who have proven humility in victory or grace in defeat. This is a game after all, no reason to give up on sportsmanship just because it’s being played online, and no reason to leave the forums to sore losers, nobody likes them anyway.

Omaris Mortuus Est.2738:

Alicornus.7095:

afterwards you’re allowed to use the slimy thing between your ears..

My nose? :S

Close enough. Good to see that you didn’t lose your humor after all.

Drakkar is bad at open field fights? Equal fights are almost always won against Drakkar? KISS wipes Drakkar zergs in nine out of ten fights?! Wow, guys, you’re not supposed to take the trash talk while playing against another server THAT seriously. Trash talk is there to keep up the moral, especially when things go south, afterwards you’re allowed to use the slimy thing between your ears. Allowing your ego to get the better of you while posting such nonsense in public doesn’t let you look smart or ‘pro’, that’s the kind of response of defiance you would have to expect from a small child.

Yes, you may be surprised or even shocked to be blown out of the water in this matchup, but so are we. We were fired up for this round, we already have a large raid TS for the community but when we prepared for the reset, it was hardly enough to contain all players looking forward to fight you, and for the first hours you didn’t fail to deliver: The reset fights were awesome. Finally getting some bruises after two weeks against underdog servers (although they were doing their best, something that shouldn’t be overlooked) brought out the best in the public zerg at your borderlands. It reminded me of a lot of great reset fights I had in the past with this server and I really enjoyed it.

Instead of making a fool of yourself by trying to tell the world fairytales about the weakness of the Drakkari, the same Drakkari who showed off their skill and spirit against far higher ranked servers than yours in the past, rally your players and fight for pride’s sake at least for some hours per day. Most of our players know very well how it feels to be the underdog in a matchup and therefore honor a good display of fighting spirit.

Pathetic whining on the other hand is just degrading for RoS.

Congratulations on the Stonemist claim to Vaabi, your timing was excellent.

Although it’s a shame because you’re really putting up a fight if you get the chance to, the matchup isn’t exactly a nail-biter because Drakkar Lake has more WvW players than Blacktide and Vaabi altogether. Combine this with the queue of doom and it becomes apparent why we don’t and often enough can’t gather our most gritty veterans everywhere and everytime.
There is also a tendency to not give your best when there is no pressure to do so, and having an unnecessarily long fight against a bunch of determined opponents is certainly more fun than having a short one and waiting for something to happen for hours to come or running around all the time while trying to defend the entire Eternal Battlegrounds.
Speaking for myself I enjoy the times when you’re able to gather enough players on a map to stand your ground for a while, even when our performance is not always what it could be (and sometimes should be). Watching fortified and well armed keeps with no significant opposing forces around is not the most exciting thing to do in GW2 after all.

To be honest, I don’t give a flying whatever about that. I came for some good fights and I had them, I just don’t like the arrogance you put on display in your first post. It is absolutely impossible for Piken Square to have anything less than yet another week of total domination against two servers with mostly public raids, a much smaller player base and a coverage that isn’t even comparable, the least you can do is to remain silent instead of bragging like that.

Guilds? No, two public raids. But yeah, you’re the greatest, no doubt about that… or you would be if you wouldn’t be that proud of being able to beat a server with a way smaller player base that you have to brag about it.

Yaro.3251:

Yeah what happens atm at Piken BL is a massacre no less. But somehow I don’t feel sorry. After Drak’s initial all-map Garri push at reset we were like “Mmkay so that’s how you want it to go down. Well, you have no idea what you’ve just started…”

Lol, it seems like we hurted somebodys feelings by whiping the well known guild zergs time and time again despite being the underdog and now that you have the upper hand you have to brag in order to make up for it.

Although it’s another trash matchup as a whole, the reset fights on the PS borderlands were quite entertaining, thanks for some hours of good WvW action.

Jayne.9251:

But when I was on, DL pushed Anza at least four times, three times with 3-4 catas by moles, and then once with two trebs and a least a 50 man zerg a little further away from moles.

Err… you should check your glasses. The “at least 50 man zerg” held the outmanned buff all the time during these attacks, we were about 25 players and it was a public raid with only a handful of experienced Drakkari against two guild zergs from Piken Square. Yeah, I really wonder how we could not take over Anza under these circumstances.